"Magic is fiction. So, writing fiction
about magic is the most natural thing in the world."
--Daniel Stashower

One
need only consider the impact of Shakespeare's Prospero and Puck to L. Frank
Baum's Wizard of Oz to the current Harry Potter rage (and billions in
business) to understand the role magicians play in literature and popular
culture.

In 1971 a young boy wandered into Hamleys department store
in London and was smitten with the world of magic when the magic counter
demonstrator changed an American penny into a dime. "I didn't realize until
much later that it was unusual for the English to feature an American money
trick" Daniel Stashower related during a phone interview with MagicTimes.

This trip to Great Britain would be the first of many for
this Cleveland native who has since become a best-selling mystery writer and
an award-winning biographer of Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock
Holmes. After five years of hard living and writing, in several countries, and
a lifetime of research, Stashower's Teller of Tales--The Life of Arthur
Conan Doyle was published by the Henry Holt Company in 1999 winning the
prestigious Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. The book was also
awarded the coveted Agatha Award presented by the Malice Domestic Mystery
Convention that same week.

This past April Stashower received rave reviews for his new
biography of Philo T. Farnsworth, titled The Boy Genius and the Mogul,
the inventor of the key component of modern television. "It is a wonderful
tale," wrote Malcom Gladell in The New Yorker, "Riveting and bittersweet." In
fact, before the biography rolled off the press, it was optioned for a movie
production by MIRAMAX films.

Daniel Stashower was educated at Northwestern University and
received his Masters in Creative Writing from Columbia University. During his
graduate studies he wrote and published his first novel The Adventure of
the Ectoplasmic Man where Houdini and Sherlock Holmes meet and solve a
crime. "I was always interested in the fact that Houdini and Conan Doyle kept
popping up in each others biographies," Stashower told MagicTimes. Indeed,
when considering that the two historic figures knew each other and later had a
falling out over their conflicting views on spiritualism, the story is rife
with intrigue -- even prompting Houdini's lawyer Bernard M. L. Ernst to pen
the tome Houdini & Doyle: A Strange Friendship.

Having become a published author at age 24, Stashower set
out to use his magical experience to create a new figure in the magic-mystery
pantheon: Paul Galliard.

Galliard, in fact, was modeled after Stashower's own
practice of magic at restaurants, bars, parties and the occasional club show.
"The silk to cane, the invisible deck, mouth coils, a pretty mean rising card
trick, rope tricks learned from Abbott's Encyclopedia of Rope Magic and
Gene Anderson's torn and restored newspaper were my stock-in-trade," the
writer says. At one performance for MENSA (the high IQ society), he stumped
the attendance by making a champagne bottle dematerialize instantaneously.

During a panel discussion for The Boucheron Mystery
Conference in 2001 he was asked to appear as a character from one of his
books. He came attired in a straitjacket ala Houdini. When a question came to
him, he exhaled with great gusto and told the audience that he had been
holding his breath for a record 30 minutes. The audience roared. His lectures
for Sherlockians are often peppered with a little magic such as predicting a
word (via a "Holmesian hunch") that will be chosen at random from one of his
books. At The Players club on Gramercy Park south in Manhattan he regaled his
audience with a tongue-in-cheek Houdini-like challenge. He asked the audience
to name any topic at all, and Stashower claimed he would be able to align that
topic to Arthur Conan Doyle. Like Houdini, he's never been beaten. He has been
admitted to the most exclusive of all Sherlockian societies, the Baker Street
Irregulars. His investiture, or club name is, appropriately enough, Thurston.
The celebrated writer is a pretty hard-core fan of Holmes and his creator.
He's sported a meerschaum pipe and deerstalker hat from time to time. For
several years he had a guinea pig roommate named Mrs. Hudson.

The Galliard mystery titled Elephants in the Distance
was lauded by Marilyn Stasio in The New York Times: "The author works
powerful magic of the literary kind on these courtly old illusionists,
presenting their played-out routines with courtesy and their worn out persons
with respect...Mr. Stashower's second mystery is no sleight of hand trick, but
a model whodunit, expertly constructed and executed with real finesse."

Finesse is a good word to describe this writer who has
parlayed his practice of and passion for magic into articles about the late
Mike Skinner for Connoisseur and magic collector Ken Klosterman for
Smithsonian magazine. He is co-author of an episode of the Showtime TV
series Stargate. For many years he wrote the magic, occult and psychic
sections of the famous Time-Life series Mysteries of the Unknown. Of
his own beliefs, Stashower writes in Teller of Tales that "I should
admit that I have never had any traffic with the spirit realm, that I am a
supporter of the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the
Paranormal, and that it has been some years since I believed in fairies. At
the same time, I also belong to the Society for Psychical Research, I once
shook hands with Uri Geller and some of my closest friends claim to be
psychic. I consider myself, then, a cordial disbeliever."

Shortly after his second novel, Daniel Stashower was awarded
the Raymond Chandler Fulbright Fellowship in Detective and Crime Fiction
Writing to Oxford University. He often delighted his colleagues adorned in
formal professorial robes with Paul Curry's Out of this World at the
high table over decanters of port at Wadham College.

It was during his year-long stay at Oxford that the greatest
magic entered his life -- his program director Alison Corbett. On their first
date they attended the magical show Le Cirque Invisible featuring
Victoria Chaplin and her magician-husband Jean Baptiste Thierree. The lovely
Ms. Corbett magically became Mrs. Stashower a few years later.

The
married couple returned to the US in 1997 shortly after Stashower's compendium
of magical novelties (aided by Dr. Edwin A. Dawes and others) was published as
The Redstone Box of Tricks which was later published by Random House as
The Magic Box and in its third incarnation as The Hocus Pocus Box.
The Stashowers now live in Bethesda, Maryland with their young son, Sam.

The Stashower house is magical and mysterious. The living
room is replete with an antique rotating bookshelf and a beautifully framed
"Alexander -- The Man Who Knows" poster. The bookshelves are lined with his
awards sitting next to his Tarbell Course.

Stashower comes by his profession with some family history.
Hugo Gernsback, his grandmother's eccentric cousin, was the man who coined the
term "science fiction."

It was Gernsback's publication Amazing Stories that
inspired a fourteen year old boy named Philo T. Farnsworth in Idaho, who,
while plowing the family farm, saw the patterns that the hay fell in. Somehow
young Philo transfigured those patterns into beams of electrons, which would
later become the basis for television! The story Stashower relates of
Farnsworth's struggle to achieve independence as an inventor is heart
breaking, and told with the pacing and intrigue of a first class drama.
Farnsworth is an underdog -- though does achieve fame if not real fortune.

Stashower is adept at presenting this character as he is at
profiling the young, fictionalized Houdini in his three mystery novels
depicting the pre-world famous self liberator: The Dime Museum Murders, The
Floating Lady Murder (where a woman drowns while floating in mid air) and
The Houdini Specter.

Of making mystery with the pre-1900 Houdini,
Stashower had to make the escape artist's methods and magic plausible. The
author writes, "Bill Bixby has a lot to answer for. In 1973 he starred in a TV
series called The Magician. He played a headlining magician who solved
crimes. He lived on an airplane, drove a white Corvette and each week we
learned that there was no situation so perilous that it could not be mastered
by the skills of a really good magician. Once when witnessing an attempted mob
hit of a woman bound in chains and shackled and tossed in the ocean, Anthony
Blake (Bixby's character) went to rescue her. And he had a set of lock picks
in his dive suit! In his dive suit mind you!" After the series ended -- when
the young writer-magician was 13 and busily trying to master the Multiplying
Billiard Balls and the Hippety Hop Rabbits -- he set out to find more
magician-detective writers and stories and ended up consumed by the work of
John Dickson Carr, Clayton Rawson, Walter Gibson and lesser known authors Bill
Ballinger and Guy Cullingford.

It was from this education in addition to Milbourne
Christopher's Illustrated History of Magic (he owns writer-magician
Christopher's travel typewriter) that he encountered the problem of logic in
magician characters in mystery writing.

His main protagonist Paul Galliard uses his magical skills
to help deduce who is killing a series of old magicians and sending along the
tell-tale death warrant of a broken wand. In his Houdini series, the stories
of young Harry's exploits are told by his brother Hardeen as yarns of
yesteryear. Hardeen relates his brother's bombastic ego and cleverness much
the same way Watson spoke of Sherlock Holmes' shrewd behavior.

What
distinguishes Stashower's fictionalization of Houdini and the creation of
Galliard is his honest intent and execution of what magicians actually do. It
is easy to have a magician snap his fingers and make evil disappear. But
Stashower's integrity as a magician supports historical accuracy and engages
the reader with backstage cleverness without giving away magical
technique...and this is not easy to do. The addition of genuine history such
as Mr. McAdow, Kellar's manager in The Floating Lady Murder is a plus
on top of his devilishly clever plots. One Sherlockian member of the erudite
Baker Street Irregulars, Bill Vande Water, sums up Stashower's unique talents
for meshing magic and mystery writing: "He is very good at showing (and not
telling) how the magician, adept at the psychology of deception, uses his
knowledge to see through the deceits of the criminal. His strongest points in
all his works is his trust in the intelligence of the reader. He presents his
clues and explanations without patronizing his audience (another good facet of
any good magician or stage persona)."

At the end of his third novel in his Harry Houdini Mystery
Series (available from Avon Books) Stashower invokes the creation of
television and ends the book by telling the reader that he is not "pulling a
fast one" by using the invention as a plot device. "When it comes to research,
I'm on pretty solid ground," he tells the reader in a brief Afterword.

He followed his series about the "justly celebrated elusive
American" Houdini with a story that is as big as can be told -- the creation
of television. In fact, you would not be reading this story in this medium
were it not for the brilliant Philo T. Farnsworth chronicled in Stashower's
sympathetic and detailed The Boy Genius and the Mogul (Broadway Books).

Daniel
Stashower is at heart a magician. His output is prodigious. Since 1999 he has
published 5 books -- 3 novels and 2 biographies. When one enters his office he
is apt to make objects transform while under glass or relate a scenario that
is worthy of his books. Like many magicians, he loves gadgets and adventure.
Like the subjects of his books -- he takes risks, and he usually succeeds in
overcoming adversity. He has meshed the colorful history of magic including
its eccentric and innovative characters with the greatest tales of the most
notable writers, inventors and magicians of the 20th century.

When you read Stashower's The Boy Genius and the Mogul
see if you agree that there is magic at work when you read of "capturing
light in a bottle," the Houdiniesque chapter about "The Battle of the Century"
or the fact that Farnsworth and magicians "fooled the eye into seeing
electrons producing a solid image at once."

After all, TV, the invention that revolutionized modernity
(that we take for granted) was initially called "the magic box."

---Ben Robinson

To find out more about these Daniel Stashower books or to purchase them
click on the individual titles below:

Ben
Robinson is a magician and writer who lives in New York City. He wrote
"Twelve Have Died," the definitive book on the Bullet Catch, and is a
recipient of the Milbourne Christopher Foundation award for his notable
contributions to magic. He is the co-founder of The Art Rock 'N Roll
Circus and produced STOMP at Lincoln Center. His latest book "Ben
Robinson On Synchronicity" was published last year on CD. For more
information visit:
www.illusiongenius.com.